VN Demo Round-Up!

I have 17 demos installed in my Steam library, most of them are spicy gay visual novels.  I need to get through them to decide if I want to buy them or not.  I'm going to play each one until I reach an ending, then write down my thoughts and judgements here.

HKIA: Tea Garden Hype!

OMG, I love tea, and the fantasy of tea parties.  This is so fucking cute!  I know, I haven't finished base game, or Wheatflour Wonderland, or City Town, but I'm still gonna get this when it launches.

15 clothing items with 300+ variants means they're DYABLE!  My favorite thing!  I love dyable clothes.

2 new food stations?  I bet one's a tea pot and I'm so DOWN FOR TEA!

50 decor items?  Great!

A new questline?  Great!  I hope I don't need Wish me mell maxed, because I'm still pretty far behind on that.

All this for ten bucks?  Sign me up! I guess I better get back to gifting Wish me mell rare fish...

2026 Media Goals update 3

I've been going super hard on my other hobbies, so my media backlog is barely touched, but I have made some new progress.

An Older Guy's VR First Love Manga Review

An Older Guy's VR First Love was written by Violence Tomoko and published in English in 2022.  It's about a middle aged man and an elderly man who meet in a VR world, with the avatars of young ladies, and fall in love.

As a person who's fallen in love with people online before, this story really resonated with me.  It's sad, beautiful, and familiar all at once.

I suppose it could be considered both BL and GL, since the characters are both men, but both have female avatars, but really, I just feel like it's neither, and just a unique story about an experience probably more common than people would like to admit. 

I finally watched Kpop Demon Hunters!

Okay, okay, I FINALLY sat down and watched Kpop Demon Hunters.  The soundtrack kept popping up on my Kpop radio station.  And the merch is so cute, but I refused to buy any until after I saw the movie.

I'm on board.  It took a good 10-20 minutes for me to get used to the animation style, but once I did, it was pretty smooth sailing.  It was a fun movie and I had a great time.  I love Kpop, so the soundtrack was right up my alley.  The choreography was very familiar.  The songs were catchy.

Rumi, Zoey, and Mira?  I think those were their names.  They're demon hunters.  But Rumi is half demon and forced to hide it.  Bummer.  But in the end, that secret is blown, but they all sing their problems away while violently destroying demons, and it all works out.

The villains, the Saja Boys, were fine.  Their numbers were good.  Aside from Jinu, none of the other guys got any real character development, so I guess they're not important.  I would have liked to get to know them better, but fuck it. 

2026 Media Goals Update 2

Well, the good news is I've done a considerable amount more gaming.  The bad news is I'm still not really cracking into my backlog.

Books.  I'm behind on this.  I completely stopped reading on Kindle for a while.  I've been pushing myself really hard in other areas, so I need to take a step back from them and let myself sit and read more.  My Kindle might need a charge.

Why I changed my mind on Hello Kitty Island: City Town

Okay, hear me out.  I know I said I wasn't going to buy Hello Kitty Island's new expansion, City Town, because it costs more than Wheatflour Wonderland, until it went on sale, but I've done some serious thinking in the meantime, and I feel in the current cozy game market, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is still significantly more honest, upfront, and reasonably priced than other cozy games being pushed right now.  Sure, there are a lot of free to play games coming out, but listen, the games run on servers, and servers cost money, so they'll get the money out of you one way or another, and I feel that HKIA's competitors are doing so much more deviously.  I feel more comfortable giving my money to Sunblink for solid expansions full of content and costumes, then getting individual outfits sold to me in lucky boxes or whatever.  I still feel that Sunblink is being honest and fair, and they have yet to introduce gambling mechanics and predatory microtransactions.

Could they potentially turn around and introduce gambling mechanics and predatory microtransactions?  Of course, we're in the worst possible timeline.  Everything horrible that can happen, is happening.  But I don't feel that Sunblink has reached that point yet.  Yes, they said they were going to introduce smaller content packs this summer, but I'm not going to judge them until they're out.  I only have a few months to wait.  In the meantime, I'll check out City Town, and judge it on it's own merits.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Review

Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream came out on Thursday.  After 12 years of waiting since the last Tomodachi Life, it's finally here.  I got it on launch day.  And I've played it and watched others play it.  I'm really glad they made it compatible with the Switch 1, because skipping over a whole console would have been pretty mean.  It's probably the last Switch game I'm going to be concerned with, though.

The Mii Creator is very robust, easily double the amount of features the basic Mii creator has, including more noses, eyes, ears, and the introduction of face paint, which people are using for all sorts of cool effects.  In addition, all the base hairs are improved, so imported Miis from your system look nicer too.

Once you have a few Miis, gameplay is surprisingly cozy and cute.  Animations are adorable, interactions are sweet, most Miis get along very well...  It's definitely less chaotic than it's predecessor, which some people like and others don't.  I'm actually okay with it, because I don't want bad things happening to my precious little Miis.

Hello Kitty Island News, and my plans regarding...

Welp, news came out today.  The City Town DLC is gonna be 25$.  That's more than I'm willing to pay, but the base game has gone on sale a few times, so I'm sure the DLC will go on sale too.  I would have bought it in an instant if it was 15$ like Wheatflour Wonderland was, but this price hike is a little to much for me.  

Also, they're gonna start adding paid cosmetic packs this summer.  This isn't surprising, but I'm still disappointed.  When getting cosmetics and furniture is the core gameplay loop, having some for sale is definitely pay to win.  I don't know if I will quit the game entirely, but I will be very reluctant to pay for future content from here on out.

I'm not mad, just disappointed. 

2026 Steam Spring Sale Recap

The Steam Spring Sale ends today, and I thought it'd be fun to recap what I bought and downloaded.  This sale, I was super cheap, and only sprung for cheap, silly games.

Hello Kitty Island: City Town Hype

I still play Hello Kitty Island, every day.  I still have loads of quests to do, because  I'm lazy and just login for the login rewards, do the holiday event, and leave.  I know, I need to fucking play the game.  I also need more ADHD meds.  We'll see what happens first.

Anyways, they finally announced the release date for their next DLC, City Town.  Surprisingly, it's the same day as the Tomodachi Life release.  This seems on purpose, since there will be a good bit of overlap between each game's player base.  There both kinda cozy games, targeting Switch players.   I'm prolly gonna get both, to be honest, but I might wait a while to get City Town, since I still haven't finished base game or Wheatflour Wonderland.  Yeah, I have a lot to get through, so we'll see.  City Town DLC drops on April 16.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream DEMO

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a game coming out next month that I've wanted for a decade.  It's predecessor, Tomodachi Life on 3DS was loads of fun, but it's biggest setback was inability to make gay couples and queer characters.  Living the dream remedies that with 3 gender options, and romantic orientation options to include any arrangement of those 3 genders.  The 3 genders are male, female, and nonbinary.  Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a huge upgrade from just male and female and all forced to be straight!  My OCs are all gay or bi, and I'm fucking nonbinary, so yay, all good changes for me.

2026 Media Goals update 1

I set some really lofty goals for this year, media wise.  I wanted to finish and review 1 book, 1 vn, and 1 cartridge game each month.  So far, every review I've posted this year is media I already played or read and finished last year or earlier.  I have a crazy amount of goals this year, between my writing, my art, my dolls, and my backlog, but I don't think I should give up just yet.

His Primal Kiss by Kota Quinn

His Primal Kiss is book 2 in the Monster Match series that I started last year.  I know they look like women on the cover art, but the two main characters are both male.  They're just really pretty for an orc and a human.

Maddox is an orc tattoo artist who specializes in magic, healing tattoos.  He gets a lot of old people as customers.  He went to open up shop in the human world because something (I can't remember what) told him his soul mate would be a human so he thought his chances of meeting a human soulmate would be best in the human world.  Very logical, I appreciate that.

Dani is a pretty guy with a supernatural stalker, so he hires the orc to be his bodyguard at first, and then they start dating.  Fake dating?  Then real dating.  The story isn't what I'm here for, let's be honest.  I just want to watch them be cute and kiss and yeah.

Not as strong as the first one in the series, but it's fiiine.  I enjoyed it.  Oh, and the supernatural stalker situation gets resolved and everybody gets a happy ending.  I probably could've skipped this one, but then I wouldn't have met the main character for the next book! 

Princess Debut for Nintendo DS

Princess Debut was one of my first handheld games ever.  It came out in 2008.  It's about half visual novel, half dancing minigame.  You're a schoolgirl named Sabrina (unless you change it) who swaps places with a princess with the same face and name because the schoolgirl wants to meet princes and dance and the princess really doesn't.  To get each ending, you need to beat the dance competition with each prince.  One playthrough is about 8 hours, and there are 6 princes with a 7th hidden prince.

I love the shit out of this game.  It's painfully repetitive and takes forever to get through a playthrough, but I still love it to death.  I beat it 3 times the first time I had it, then sold it, then missed it so much I bought a new copy to try again.

I hope you like midi files, because that's what all the songs are, midi files of really old classical numbers.  Some of them still play in my mind, even though I haven't touched the game in ages.  You can't really customize your character but you do get costumes and ballgowns to choose between for the dancing segments.  I haven't unlocked them all yet.

I can't deny, the game is a bit harder to play on a 3DSXL, because it was designed for a smaller screen, so your hands need to work harder during the dancing, but I still love this stupid game.

Do I have a favorite prince?  No, they're all pretty dumb.  Okay, maybe the secret 7th prince is okay, who knows I never got him.  Do I think any of them are gay and shippable?  No, they act like children, so I can't see them that way.  I don't take much stock in the protagonist marrying one at the end either.  It's cute, but they're kids.

NekoPara vol 1 Review

NekoPara vol. 1!  The one that started it all.  It came out in 2014, and I read it first in 2018.  The first read took me 2 months, holy crap.  I'm a slow reader.  Any ways, the first hour is one long angst fest as Kashou tries to convince Chocola and Vanilla to go home, and they beg Kashou to let them stay with him at his new bakery.  They prove their worth, become waitresses, and all the rest of the novel is mostly fluff.

Book Review: Threading Carefully by Ashlynn Mills

Threading Carefully by Ashlynn Mills is the first in the Monster Match series, a collab project by a bunch of writers all in the same supernatural universe.  I read a few of them last year, so I'm gonna read more this year, and review the two I've already read now.

Nova is a Frankenstein-type monster, made up of the corpses of other people, held together with thread.  His first "master" was his creator, who was a really bad person, but that's not the important part.  He's on his own, looking for new friends and a chance to go to the human world.

Frank is a human doctor with an interest in the healing properties of things from the monster world.  He also doesn't have a lot of friends and just got dumped, I think.  And since he's a physical doctor who's handled injured humans a lot, he's already got practice stitching people up.  Plus, Nova thinks he's really cute.

There's a secondary plot about Frank's best friend dating a guy trying to sabotage relations between the monster world and human world, but really what you're here to read is Nova and Frank being cute together.  And Frank thinks he's straight in the beginning, but he really goes for Nova, so I guess you're Bi, Frank!

Fluff and smut aside, this is a good introduction to the Monster Match series, and I liked it so much, that I read book 2, which I'll add the review later.